This century-long period of turmoil had already received considerable attention from such chroniclers as Edward Halle and Raphael Holinshed, the creators of what is sometimes called the “Tudor myth” of English history. The Life of Henry V is a “history play” in more senses than one: it is a play about how history is made, and also how it is remade it is a representation of past events while being at the same time an examination of the uses of the past and it is a play whose own reconstruction of history consciously intervened in the historical process.Īs the text itself reminds us, Henry V was the latest of a series of English history plays in which Shakespeare had dramatized the fifteenth-century conflict between the royal families of York and Lancaster. “It is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.”